Xenocide

“Those are awfully big ifs,” said Valentine.

“You forget,” said Olhado. “We start from the premise that wishing makes it so.”

“Right, I forgot to mention that,” said Grego. “We also assume that the hive queen is right that the unorganized philotes respond to patterns in someone's mind, immediately assuming whatever role is available in the pattern. So that things that are comprehended Outside will immediately come to exist there.”

“All this is perfectly clear,” said Valentine. “I'm surprised you didn't think of it before.”

“Right,” said Grego. “So here's how we do it. Instead of trying to physically move all the particles that compose the starship and its passengers and cargo from Star A to Star B, we simply conceive of them all– the entire pattern, including all the human contents– as existing, not Inside, but Outside. At that moment, all the philotes that compose the starship and the people in it disorganize themselves, pop through into the Outside, and reassemble themselves there according to the familiar pattern. Then we do the same thing again, and pop back Inside– only now we're at Star B. Preferably a safe orbiting distance away.”

“If every point in our space corresponds to a point Outside,” said Valentine, “don't we just have to do our traveling there instead of here?”

“The rules are different there,” said Grego. “There's no whereness there. Let's assume that in our space, whereness– relative location– is simply an artifact of the order that philotes follow. It's a convention. So is distance, for that matter. We measure distance according to the time it takes to travel it– but it only takes that amount of time because the philotes of which matter and energy are comprised follow the conventions of natural law. Like the speed of light.”

“They're just obeying the speed limit.”

“Yes. Except for the speed limit, the size of our universe is arbitrary. If you looked at our universe as a sphere, then if you stood outside the sphere, it could as easily be an inch across or a trillion lightyears or a micron.”

“And when we go Outside–”

“Then the Inside universe is exactly the same size as any of the disorganized philotes there– no size at all. Furthermore, since there is no whereness there, all philotes in that space are equally close or nonclose to the location of our universe. So we can reenter Inside space at any point.”

“That makes it sound almost easy,” said Valentine.

“Yes, well,” said Grego.

“It's the wishing that's hard,” said Olhado.

“To hold the pattern, you really have to understand it,” said Grego. “Each philote that rules a pattern comprehends only its own part of reality. It depends on the philotes within its pattern to do their job and hold their own pattern, and it also depends the philote that controls the pattern that it's a part of to keep it in its proper place. The atom philote has to trust the neutron and proton and electron philotes to hold their own internal structures together, and the molecule philote to hold the atom in its proper place, while the atom philote concentrates on his own job, which is keeping the parts of the atom in place. That's how reality seems to work– in this model, anyway.”

“So you transplant the whole thing to Outside and back Inside again,” said Valentine. “I understood that.”

“Yes, but who? Because the mechanism for sending requires that the whole pattern for the ship and all its contents be established as a pattern of its own, not just an arbitrary conglomeration. I mean, when you load a cargo on a ship and the passengers embark, you haven't created a living pattern, a philotic organism. It's not like giving birth to a baby– that's an organism that can hold itself together. The ship and its contents are just a collection. They can break apart at any point. So when you move all the philotes out into disorganized space, lacking whereness or thisness or any organizing principle, how do they reassemble? And even if they reassemble themselves into the structures they know, what do you have? A lot of atoms. Maybe even living cells and organisms– but without spacesuits or a starship, because those aren't alive. All the atoms and maybe even the molecules are floating around, probably replicating themselves like crazy as the unorganized philotes out there start copying the pattern, but you've got no ship.”

“Fatal.”

“No, probably not,” said Grego. “Who can guess? The rules are all different out there. The point is that you can't possibly bring them back into our space in that condition, because that definitely would be fatal.”

“So we can't.”

“I don't know. Reality holds together in Inside space because all the philotes that it's comprised of agree on the rules. They all know each other's patterns and follow the same patterns themselves. Maybe it can all hold together in Outside space as long as the spaceship and its cargo and passengers are fully known. As long as there's a knower who can hold the entire structure in her head.”

“Her?”

“As I said, I have to have Jane do the calculations. She has to see if she has access to enough memory to contain the pattern of relationships within a spaceship. She has to then see if she can take that pattern and imagine its new location.”

“That's the wishing part,” said Olhado. “I'm very proud of it, because I'm the one who thought of needing a knower to move the ship.”

“This whole thing is really Olhado's,” said Grego, “but I intend to put my name first on the paper because he doesn't care about career advancement and I have to look good enough for people to overlook this felony conviction if I'm going to get a job at a university on another world somewhere.”

“What are you talking about?” said Valentine.

“I'm talking about getting off this two-bit colony planet. Don't you understand? If this is all true, if it works, then I can fly to Rheims or Baia or– or Earth and come back here for weekends. The energy cost is zero because we're stepping outside natural laws entirely. The wear and tear on the vehicles is nothing.”

“Not nothing,” said Olhado. “We've still got to taxi close to the planet of destination.”

“As I said, it all depends on what Jane can conceive of. She has to be able to comprehend the whole ship and its contents. She has to be able to imagine us Outside and Inside again. She has to be able to conceive of the exact relative positions of the startpoint and endpoint of the journey.”

“So faster-than-light travel depends completely on Jane,” said Valentine.

“If she didn't exist, it would be impossible. Even if they linked all the computers together, even if someone could write the program to accomplish it, it wouldn't help. Because a program is just a collection, not an entity. It's just parts. Not a– what was the word Jane found for it? An aiua.”

“Sanskrit for life,” Olhado explained to Valentine. “The word for the philote who controls a pattern that holds other philotes in order. The word for entities– like planets and atoms and animals and stars– that have an intrinsic, enduring form.”

“Jane is an aiua, not just a program. So she can be a knower. She can incorporate the starship as a pattern within her own pattern. She can digest it and contain it and it will still be real. She makes it part of herself and knows it as perfectly and unconsciously as your aida knows your own body and holds it together. Then she can carry it with her Outside and back Inside again.”

“So Jane has to go?” asked Valentine.

“If this can be done at all, it'll be done because Jane travels with the ship, yes,” said Grego.

“How?” asked Valentine. “We can't exactly go pick her up and carry her with us in a bucket.”

“This is something Andrew learned from the hive queen,” said Grego. “She actually exists in a particular place– that is, her aiua has a specific location in our space.”